Blog post
Our castaway is Carl Abrahamsson, a writer, publisher, magico-anthropologist, filmmaker, and photographer whose decades of exploration in the occultural sphere have helped shape the modern magickal landscape. The esoteric island goes back to the source.
Blog post
We reflect on a year spent in the seventh century and in 2025. Apocalyptic themes seem to have dominated both time-frames. Here's to a sublime and less exciting 2026!
Roots of Magic episode
We dive back into the world of Akkadian purification magic with Beatrice Baragli, who is working on an edition of the ritual sequence known as Bīt Rimki (`The Bathhouse'). Politics used to be very magical.
Podcast episode
We let the tape run and explore the possibility that Maximus had an esoteric doctrine of universal salvation, centring the conversation on two passages from the Ambigua, which seemingly contradict one-another. Things remain, appropriately, ambiguous, and universalist vs. anti-universalist readings of Maximus will continue to flourish. Jonathan Greig delineates what is at stake.
Podcast episode
We head back to Constantionple with Jonathan Greig at the controls, to discuss the quintessentially Orthodox mystic, Maximus the Confessor. Late-Platonist apophasis meets hard-core ascesis, and Maximus follows the theology where it wants to go, sometimes to his own cost.
Oddcast episode
Jason Josephson-Storm returns to the SHWEP to discuss one of the most influential thinkers on modern western esoteric movements – Sir James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough – and where, precisely, J.G.F. might fit within western esotericism itself.
Roots of Magic episode
We discuss a fascinating text of all-purpose protective and apotropaic magic with a history spanning millennia with the inimitable Gideon Bohak. Attributed to a first-century rabbi, the Pishra may have its roots in late-antique Babylonia, but it was still being copied into the twentieth century, and, who knows? perhaps today.
Podcast episode
Christopher Bonura introduces us to the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodios, a seventh-century Syriac prophetic universal history. Come for the Arab conquests reflected in Christian revelation, stay for the apocalyptic Roman emperor.
Oddcast episode
Having laid out fairy-magic as a genre, and discussing some of its characteristics, we are delighted to speak with Daniel Harms about the people and social circumstances behind the texts and practices of fairy-magic.
Podcast episode
In this interview we explore a crucial document of seventh-century Judaism: the Sefer Zerubbabel, an apocalyptic ‘future history’ allegedly written in the past. The Temple will descend, the evil Armilus (son of Satan and a statue) will wreak havok, and two messiahs will arise to redeem Israel.
Podcast episode
With the Arab conquest of Sasanian Persia, a new religion enters the west. Once the great religious Other to the Græco-Roman world, the Zoroastrians are now part of the story of western esotericism. We explore their extraordinary religion with Touraj Daryaee.
Roots of Magic episode
We explore the ancient Mesopotamian ritual-series known as Šurpu with Frank Simons. This interview is a window onto very, very ancient magical practice, but has a surprising amount to tell us about magic today.
Oddcast episode
We delve further into the learned fairie-summoning tradition with Samuel Gillis Hogan. Fairies evolve into non-human persons, the mainstream and fringe news take an interest in research into fairies, and the methodology for studying a world-view in which fairies are obviously real is discussed.
Oddcast episode
Did you know that there is a whole practical and occult-philosophic corpus dealing with the summoning and controlling of faeries? Samuel Gillis Hogan tells us about his research in the archives of early-modern British faerie-magic.
Podcast episode
In Part I we looked at the political events leading up to the formation of the Shi'a. In Part II we see that it did not take long for things to get very esoteric. Come for the programmatic esoteric hermeneutics, stay for the occult sciences.
Podcast episode
We pick up from our last episode, where geopolitics and esotericism met in the crucible of Roman, Sassanian, and Arab political struggles. Ahab Bdaiwi threads the labyrinth of the earliest historical sources for the birth of the movement within Islām which came to be known as the Party of ‘Alī, or the Shi‘ā.
Blog post
We speak with Dan Levene, expert on the ancient Judæo-Aramaic incantation-bowls, on the bowls, the skulls, the Talmud, and what all of this tells us about late-ancient Judaism in the Sasanian empire and beyond.
Roots of Magic episode
We speak with Dan Levene, expert on the ancient Judæo-Aramaic incantation-bowls, on the bowls, the skulls, the Talmud, and what all of this tells us about late-ancient Judaism in the Sasanian empire and beyond.
Oddcast episode
Manichæism had a very distinctive eschatological theory. Join us as Håkon Fiane Teigen leads us down the Three Paths trod by the Manichæan dead: one leading up to the heavens, one down to the hells, and a third back into incarnation again and again.
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